We commonly hold to the idea that conservatives are stupid, backwoods-dwelling, incest-bred, bigoted, racist, sexist neo-Luddites, while Liberals are cultured, erudite, pedantic and open-minded scholars. Libertarians? They're just crazy.
Truth is, liberals are really, really stupid.
A new poll taken by Odyssey proves it. The survey covered more than 1,400 people within the ages of 18-35, AKA "the Millennials." Millennials as a demographic group make up 26.2 percent of the United States population, or 82 million people. According to the Educational Test Service, "This generation of American workers and citizens will largely determine the shape of the American economic and social landscape of the future." If one thing is for sure, it's that this generation is super-duper liberal.
Oh snap.
According to the Odyssey's survey, younger people prefer Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump by an overwhelming 44 points, reflecting the wider trend of general election forecasts. They seem to have utterly forgotten that the DNC rigged the entire party's election against their ultimate savior, Bernie Sanders. (Sanders promised to basically make everything free; only gullible hacks could ever fall for that one). One could defend the youthful ignoramus by saying that most Millennials are voting begrudgingly for Clinton only on the grounds that she is better than Donald Trump, but this same study also shows that there is no enthusiasm gap between the candidates -- the Millennials are just as zealous for Clinton, whom they once called the "democratic corporate whore" as they once were for Sanders. The memory span of Millennials is about as long as a goldfish's.
But take another look at Odyssey's survey, and you'll find that young Liberals hold to some other very ... strange (*cough* stupid) beliefs:
Nearly one third of Millennials reject the theory of evolution. This is just ridiculous. The rest who don't reject it, I postulate, probably argue for evolution only against conservative Creationists, then suddenly forget all about it when confronted with the biological realities of race and sex. The evidence for evolution is so overwhelming that leading biologist and evolutionary advocate Richard Dawkins believes anyone who denies it should have their academic credentials re-examined, possibly revoked. Oh, but basing one's credentials on objective facts is intolerant, isn't it?
Almost half of Millennials believe there exists a deity. Studies show that there is a negative correlation between one's intelligence and one's religiosity. Religious people are generally less intelligent than skeptics. An agnostic or deistic position is almost intellectually admissible. We were all there once. A lot of us were socialists, too. (Oh, wait ...)
More than half of Millennials believe in paranormal activity. Irrational belief in the paranormal is incredibly anti-thetical to the image of the scholarly liberal. Yet young liberals are always chasing ghosts -- the ghosts of patriarchy, white privilege and rape culture. Sure, maybe my dead college mate is a poltergeist who showed up once in a seance, but there's nothing objective regarding the belief in spirits. If I had to make my bets, I'd say that once you're dead, you're dead.
More Hillary voters believe in astrology than Trump voters. This is not excusable. Sure, I know my astrological symbols -- sun sign is Cancer, moon in Virgo, Leo rising (Couldn't you tell?) The correlation to my personality is a tad uncanny. But I don't read the horoscopes every afternoon when I'm designing the newspaper pages, or make romantic decisions based on my prospective partner's sign. If you take credence in your place and time of birth under the stars, that's fine, but if you say you're more intelligent than me, I'm just going to laugh and pat you on the head.
The Millennial anti-intellectualism continues in other research studies. According to a Pew Research Center study, Millennials performed the poorest in a questionnaire regarding the public's knowledge of current events, scoring only 7.8 questions right out of 12.
Another Pew survey shows that Millennials have barely any conception of their own first amendment rights. They are the generation least likely to approve of a media outlet publishing a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad. These adult children, apparently, are more dictated by their sense of feelings and of being offended than every other age group.
While these studies might not necessarily demonstrate outright stupidity among Millennials, they reveal how easily swayed younger people are by their passions, rather than critical thinking.
Most Millennials are not pragmatic adults. They are grown-up teenagers who have no clue what they want to do with their lives, besides perhaps political activism based on outrageous philosophies grounded on completely debunked "facts" and theories (a gender wage gap, white privilege, socialism, post-colonialism, cultural appropriation). They campaign against what they see as an economy rigged for the rich, yet fail to see they themselves have no real skills to compete and have screwed themselves under mountainous piles of debt for a useless degree. They pursue their Disney-movie dreams of stardom, fame and artistry until it drives them to poverty and starvation, then rally behind proto-Communist ideologies for an impossible political revolution to support their parasitic lifestyles. They can critically analyze the hegemonic masculinity of even the most insignificant gestures into novel-length dissertations, and yet they have never balanced a check book or worked a full-time job. Millennials, if not stupid, are just not in touch with reality.
There is a clear trend of younger generations favoring the Left, until they grow older and transition to the right. Ronald Reagan, iconic Republican president, was formerly a Democrat and New Deal supporter. Once the young grow older and become financially stable, they bear the responsibility of paying for the policies and programs they had voted for in their youth. Eventually, the idealistic youth come to their senses, but much too late.
So now that we've pretty thoroughly established the anti-intellectualism of the young Left, how is it that they still earn their erudite reputation?
The conception of intelligent people naturally being drawn left, pushed by the mainstream liberal media, is derived from sources like a 2010 study from the National Lingitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which found that young adults who score "very liberal" on a political test have an average IQ of 106.42, while those deemed "very conservative" had an average of 94.82. Another study has gone so far as to blatantly profess that conservatism is "related to low performance on cognitive ability tests," while another concludes "political conservatism may be a process consequence of low-effort thought."
The social sciences, so it would appear, are the ideological nucleus of progressivism. Because a study by sociologist Markus Kemmelmeier, who had intended to prove the intellectual inferiority of conservatives and the bright minds of liberals once more, epically and hilariously failed. His study showed that, while those who held traditional views of sex and race scored lower on IQ, people with anti-regulation attitudes (pro-guns, anti-taxation, etc.) were smarter than liberals. Kemmelmeir was, suffice to say, very disappointed, since his findings were "diametrically opposed" to all established studies that currently rule that conservatives are total freaking morons. This article on Reason.com, which also discusses the study, concludes that:
"Kemmelmeier is so evidently lost in the intellectual fog of contemporary progressivism that he does not realize that his questionnaire is impeccably designed to identify classical liberals, a.k.a. libertarians, who endorse liberty in both the social and economic realms."
Conservatives are still pretty stupid. Liberals are not much better. Libertarians, however, are actually pretty damn smart.
*mic drop*
So if you're on the Alt Right or Libertarian, don't let the Left bully you into believing you're a lonely castaway, the only intelligent human being in your political affiliation. Liberals may have the "moral" high ground right now, but Alt Right and Libertarians have the intellectual one.
If you're a liberal 20-something-ish person reading this and find yourself very angry, please go away and read a book on economics or evolutionary psychology.
No, the Communist Manifesto doesn't count.
Some more excellent reading: